Since I’m widely known to have reservations about the temporary immigration bans that have been proposed by the Trump administration, I’ve been accused of believing that our borders should be completely open and that there should be no vetting whatever for foreigners seeking to enter the United States.
The fact that I believe nothing of the sort, and, consequently, have never said anything that can be reasonably construed to endorse open borders and no vetting, plainly doesn’t deter certain people from asserting that false claim.
Perhaps more seriously, though, I’ve been repeatedly denounced as a liberal because of my resistance to the proposed Trump policies. Earlier tonight, for example, a poster on my Facebook page declared how “sad” it is that I’m “a leftist liberal who hates the Constitution of the United States.”
The irony is that my reservations about the Trump executive orders on immigration come precisely from my being a conservative with strong libertarian leanings who loves the U.S. Constitution and who cares deeply about such things as religious freedom.
Can I illustrate my conservative bona fides? Indeed, I can.
I’ve done it before. But I think it’s probably time to do it again.
My parents voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964. My brother and I, however, supported the conservative candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), and, when my brother went to cast his vote, he took me into the polling booth where, as a preteen, I literally pulled the lever for the author of The Conscience of a Conservative.
As a resident of California, I voted for Ronald Reagan every time he ran for governor or for president.
I’ve subscribed to National Review since I was thirteen years old, with interruptions only when I was living overseas (e.g., for part of my mission in Switzerland).
I was a charter subscriber to the Weekly Standard, and I still subscribe to it.
I was a charter subscriber to First Things, and I still subscribe to it.
I even went through an intense Ayn Rand phase when I was in my late teens. I read everything she’d published, including not just her novels but her non-fiction works.
I participated in two summer programs of the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute, one before my mission (at Stanford’s Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace) and one just after (at St. Thomas Aquinas College).
When William F. Buckley Jr. came to speak at BYU during my undergraduate studies here, I was one of those who picked him up at the Salt Lake Airport. (I had corresponded with him just slightly during my mission.)
I’ve spoken at least three times at the huge annual libertarian FreedomFest conference.
I was a member of the Republican Party from the first moment I could vote until the night that Donald Trump, whom I don’t regard as a conservative, accepted the Party’s presidential nomination.
The first thing I ever published beyond student periodicals, I think, was an essay in the Freeman, a magazine issued by the conservative/libertarian Foundation for Economic Education.
As the winner of a national essay prize on the free market, I participated (along with such luminaries as F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, James Buchanan, Murray Rothbard, and John Chamberlain, whom anybody familiar with conservative/libertarian economics will immediately recognize) in the 1976 annual meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, which was held at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland. I seriously considered going into economics myself. (My choice for graduate school would definitely have been the University of Chicago.)
Although I liked Senator Bob Bennett very much personally and was shocked at the shoddy way the Utah Republican convention treated him in 2010, a friend and I had lunch with Mike Lee at Provo’s Brick Oven restaurant to persuade him to run for the Senate.
And, to top it all off, I’ve had dinner with Rand Paul.
And so on and so forth.
I would appreciate it if certain Trumpists out there would stop calling me a “libtard” and “a leftist liberal who hates the Constitution of the United States.”
By the way, I sometimes carry a pocket edition of the Constitution with me, to read while I’m waiting for appointments.
A leftist?
Hardly.
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